Lords Sitting of 13 March 1854

MINUTES.
PUBLIC BILLS.—1a Valuation (Ireland) Act Amendment; Highways (South Wales); Bills of Exchange.
2a Consolidated Fund (£8,000,000).

BILLS OF EXCHANGE BILL.
LORD BROUGHAM presented a Bill to permit the Registration of dishonoured Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes in England, and to allow Execution thereon. He said he wished to call the attention of the noble and learned Lord on the woolsack to this very important subject connected with the mercantile law of the kingdom. A few days ago, when presenting the Scotch Bankruptcy and Insolvency Bill, he stated that the assimilation of the Scotch and English mercantile law, now under the consideration of the Commission issued by the Lord Chancellor, was of two kinds, either assimilating the Scotch law and practice with the English law, by extending our improvements to Scotland, or improving the English law and practice by importing improvements from Scotland. The Bankruptcy and Insolvency Bill, which their Lordships were pleased to read the

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first time on Friday last, was of the first description, its object being to extend to Scotland those great improvements which had of late years been effected in the English law and practice of bankruptcy; but now he desired to present to the House a measure of the reverse kind, namely, a Bill for importing into England certain provisions in the Scotch mercantile law and practice which, in his humble apprehension, would be one of the greatest improvements that could be adopted in this country. The law at present in force in Scotland with regard to promissory notes and bills of exchange dated from the year 1682; it then referred only to inland bills, but, in 1690, it was extended to foreign bills; and, in 1772, it was made complete by being extended to drawers and indorsers as well as to acceptors, to whom it had till then been confined. When in England the holder of a bill of exchange found that he could not obtain payment from the drawer, the indorser, or the acceptor, as the case might be, his only remedy was an action at law, and the party sued naturally took advantage of all the delays and niceties of the law in order to evade, if possible, but, at all events, to postpone, the evil day of payment; and the holder ran the risk of his bankruptcy in the interval. Not so in Scotland. There the holder of a protested bill had only to register it, and the instant it was recorded a stop was put on all dealings with the debtor's property. That security to the holder of the bill was immediate, but in six days after he obtained a much better security; he had execution against the person and goods of the debtor. In order, however, to protect the latter against forgery or fraud of any description, he was permitted to institute a process with the view of staying execution, after which the matter would have to be decided before a tribunal in the regular manner; but, before the debtor could take advantage of that recourse, he must give security to the holder of the bill, not only for the amount of the debt, but also for the costs of the proceedings. The effect of that law had been most salutary to the traders of Scotland; indeed, it was not too much to say that the progress of trade and commerce in that part of the United Kingdom had been materially assisted by the admirable state of the law respecting bills of exchange and promissory notes. He would show how rarely the summary execution was resisted. In 1853 the number of bills protested was 2,470,
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but that was a year of commercial prosperity, and, in 1849, the number of protests was upwards of 4,700. The proportion of cases in which there was any attempt to stay execution was very small—not more than one per cent, and in a still less number was the resistance successful, perhaps not one case in a thousand. A law of the same sort prevailed in France, though imperfectly; in Holland the law was in some respects even more stringent than in Scotland, while, in all particulars, it gave at least the same security which the Scotch law afforded to the holders of bills of exchange. He believed it was the intention of the noble and learned Lord on the woolsack shortly to move the second reading of the Common Law Procedure Bill, and, as it might be possible to introduce this provision into the English law by an alteration in that Bill, he should merely ask that this Bill of his be read a first time then, and should postpone the second reading so as to give his noble and learned Friend an opportunity of considering this suggestion.
THE LORD CHANCELLORsaid it certainly was his intention, on an early day, to ask their Lordships to give a second reading to the Common Law Procedure Bill, but it was not his intention to proceed to a Committee on that Bill until his noble and learned Friend the Lord Chief Justice had returned from circuit, and could give the benefit of his assistance to that Committee. No doubt their Lordships would give the second reacting to the Bill just presented by the noble and learned Lord, but, after that, the most convenient course would probably be to refer it to the same Committee with the Common Law Procedure Bill. He fully appreciated the importance of the object which his noble and learned Friend had in view, but the alteration proposed to be introduced into the law of England was of so sweeping and novel a character, that he trusted the Bill would be widely circulated in the city of London, in order that those who were in the habit of accepting bills of exchange might be able to express an opinion upon the subject. Meanwhile, he would merely suggest whether, in this mercantile community, differing so much from the great bulk of the people in Scotland, a proposal to put a sort of charge upon all the property of parties would not tend very much to impede the giving of bills of exchange, which, after all, greatly facilitated proceedings on the part of creditors.
LORD BROUGHAMsaid the merchants of Scotland, especially those of the great trading city of Glasgow, were fully alive to the objection taken by the noble and learned Lord; but, notwithstanding, they were convinced that the existing law was productive of incalculable benefits. Its tendency to prevent inconsiderate credit being given was among these.
Bill read la.

SECRET CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN GOVERN- MENTS.
THE EARL OF DERBY: My Lords, I rise to put a question to the noble Earl at the head of the Government, of which I have thought it my duty to give him notice, but which I think, even though no notice had been given, he would have anticipated after what has occurred, and to which I hope he will have no hesitation in giving me an answer. In most of the morning papers of Saturday last there appeared a document of a very remarkable character, purporting to be an extract from the Journal of St. Petersburg, and professing to be in point of fact a semi-official answer of no less a personage than the Emperor of Russia himself to statements made in the other House of Parliament by one of the leading Members of Her Majesty's Government. Now, if that article had merely contained a protest against the expressions made use of by that Member of the Government, as being inconsistent with the position he occupied, and derogatory to the dignity of the party to whom he referred, I would certainly not have thought it necessary to call attention to the subject, which in that case would have assumed much more of a personal than of a public character; but the assertions and allegations contained in that manifesto or memorandum, or whatever it may be called, are of a nature which require an explanation at the hands of Her Majesty's Government, because unexplained they appear to reflect upon, at all events, the political honour—I might almost say the personal honour—of some of the principal Members of Her Majesty's Government. I have taken the extract which I hold in my hand from the Times newspaper, first, because I think the article from the Journal of St. Petersburg is given more fully in the Times than in most of the other newspapers; and next, because the Times is a paper which professes—and, I believe, truly—to enjoy to a great
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extent the confidence of Her Majesty's Government, and more especially of the noble Earl at the head of the Government—a confidence, I hope, which is not entirely undeserved, and which I must say appears to be reciprocated by the journal in question, for, at all events, it reflects with singular accuracy the opinions expressed by the noble Earl; and thirdly, because the comments which appeared in the Times upon the Russian document were themselves hardly of a less remarkable character than the document to which they referred. The Emperor of Russia, or rather the editor of the Journal of St. Petersburg, who probably would not without the Imperial sanction put forth a document of this character, after commenting upon the language made use of and the expressions applied to the Emperor by Lord John Russell, in his place in the House of Commons, proceeds to say:—
"That such distrust may have been entertained by France—that it may up to a certain point have found a place in the mind of a Government still recent, which has not had time to acquire by long experience of former relations with it an exact idea of our real intentions, and abandoning itself involuntarily to the almost traditional opinion which has been formed of Russian policy in the East—that may be easily conceived; but on the part of England, which is aware of the antecedents and the character of the Emperor from a connection of long date, an opinion of such a nature justly excites surprise. Less than any other the British Government should entertain such suspicions. It has in its hands the written proof that there is no foundation for them, for long before the present condition of affairs, before the questions which led to the mission of Prince Menchikoff to Constantinople had assumed so serious an aspect of difference, before Great Britain had adopted the same line of policy as France, the Emperor had spontaneously explained himself with the most perfect candour to the Queen and Her Ministers, with the object of establishing with them a friendly understanding even upon the most important result which can affect the Ottoman empire."
For this last sentence, in a leading article of the same date, the Times substitutes another expression which is even of a stronger character, the concluding words being—
"The Russian Government thinks fit to declare that, whatever might be the grounds of mistrust entertained by other Powers, the English Ministry had no reason to doubt the views of Russia, inasmuch as at an early period preceding Prince Menchikoff's mission the Emperor Nicholas had 'spontaneously communicated with the Queen of England and Her Ministers, for the purpose of, establishing an intimate agreement with them, even in the event of the most formidable contingency which could befall the Ottoman empire.'"
The article from the St. Petersburg Jour-

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nal, after alluding to the disorganisation of the Turkish empire, goes on to say:—
"Since the year 1829 His Majesty followed with great attention the march of events in Turkey. The Emperor could not shut his eyes to the consequences of the changes which were, one after the other, introduced into that State. Ancient Turkey disappeared from the time when it was sought to establish those institutions diametrically opposed as well to the genius of Islamism as to the character and usages of the Mussulmans—institutions more or less borrowed from modern liberalism, and consequently entirely opposed to the spirit of the Ottoman Government. It became evident that Turkey was undergoing a complete transformation, and that these experiments, at least doubtful so far as regarded the reorganisation of the empire, seemed rather calculated to lead to a crisis which would overturn it. It seemed likely that a new order of things would arise which, although indefinable, would at all events destroy that which existed."
The writer then alludes to the recent events which, in his opinion, have greatly aggravated and accelerated the crisis in Turkey, and among which he enumerates the affair of Montenegro, the religious persecution exercised in several Christian provinces, a difference with the Austrian Government, considerable financial embarrassment, and, lastly, the important affair of the Holy Places and the "imperious demands" of the French Ambassador at Constantinople. He then proceeds to say:—
"Penetrated with the extreme importance of such a result, and having at that period almost reached the region of the possible, if not entirely of the probable—convinced of the disastrous consequences which might result from it, the Emperor thought it necessary to assure himself beforehand whether the English Government shared his apprehensions. He wished more particularly by a frank previous understanding to remove every subject of misunderstanding between Great Britain and himself. It seemed of the highest importance to His Majesty to establish the most perfect identity of views with the Government of Great Britain. With this view the Emperor engaged the English Minister at St. Petersburg to cause Her Majesty to be informed of his anticipations with respect to the danger, more or less imminent, that menaced Turkey. He requested on this subject a confidential interchange of opinions with Her Britannic Majesty. That was certainly the most evident proof of confidence which the Emperor could give to the Court of St. James; and thus did His Majesty most openly signify his sincere wish to prevent any ulterior divergence between the two Governments. Sir H Seymour acquitted himself forthwith of the important commission which the Emperor had impressed on him in a long and familiar conversation. The result has shown itself in a correspondence of the most friendly character between the present English Ministers and the Imperial Government. It is not permitted to us to divulge the contents of non-official documents, which do not concern the Emperor alone, and which contain the expressions
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of a mutual confidence. What we are permitted to say is, that, in examining the circumstances more or less likely to affect the duration of the status quo in the East—an examination undertaken from the conviction respectively entertained that every effort should be made to sustain that status quo, and to prolong it as long as possible—there never was any question of a plan by which Russia and England might dispose beforehand, and between themselves, of the destiny of the different provinces which constitute the Ottoman empire; still less of a formal agreement to be concluded between them, without the knowledge and unassisted by the counsel and intervention of the other courts. The two parties were limited to a frank and single confidence, but without reserve on either side, to communicate what might be adverse to English interests, what might be so to Russian, so that in any given case hostile or even contradictory action might be avoided."
The concluding paragraph is thus expressed:—
"In looking over the different parts of this confidential correspondence, in recalling the spirit in which they themselves had interpreted it, the Ministers with whom at the time it was carried on, and who since have permitted themselves to be swayed by prepossessions to be regretted, will be able to decide if those prepossessions are just. Let Lord J. Russell more especially reperuse that correspondence, in which he was the first to take part, before ceding to Lord Clarendon the direction of foreign affairs. Let him consult his conscience, if the passion which leads him astray permit him to recognise its voice. He can decide now whether it be really true that the Emperor has been wanting in frankness towards the English Government; or if rather His Majesty has not unbosomed himself to England with as little reserve as possible; if there exists the least reason for believing that we have ambitious or exclusive views on Constantinople; or if, on the contrary, the Emperor has not explained himself in a way to remove all doubt as to his real intentions on the subject of the political combinations to be avoided, in the extreme case which he at the time pointed out to the foresight of the British Government."
Now, my Lords, I must say that the statement made in the concluding paragraph, that there were on the part of the Emperor of Russia no ambitious views with regard to Turkey, appears to be, I think, from the course which events have since taken, and from the papers which the Government have submitted to your Lordships, an allegation which cannot be maintained; but that which is really important in what I have read to you is, that here is a declaration that the Emperor of Russia had, through Sir Hamilton Seymour, made the most friendly and unreserved communication to the British Government of the views and intentions which the Emperor entertained on this subject—that the result of that communication was a most friendly correspondence between

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the Emperor of Russia and different Members of the British Government, and, as far as the Emperor could judge, a perfect identity of sentiment between the two Governments with regard to Turkey—and that, therefore, the British Government had no right to express the least surprise at the course which was subsequently pursued by the Emperor of Russia, or to deal with his motives as if they were not previously communicated or understood, and still less to affect to regard that course of action as a sufficient motive for entering into a war. But, my Lords, what appears to me to be something remarkable in the conduct of the British Government is this, that while, on the one hand, the Emperor of Russia refers to this confidential correspondence, for the purpose of showing that he had no ambitious designs with regard to Turkey, and the Times, on the other hand, alludes, in a somewhat authoritative style, to the same correspondence for the purpose of proving that there were ambitious and violent designs on the part of the Emperor of Russia with reference to the dissolution of the Turkish empire and its final settlement—while all this must have been evident, the British Government should imply that they were ignorant of what the intentions of the Russian Government really were. I do not at all complain, my Lords, that the communication made to Sir H. Seymour by the Emperor, and the subsequent confidential correspondence between the two Governments, were, in the first instance, not included in the papers submitted to Parliament, because the withholding such papers might well be justified by an honourable objection on the part of the British Government to make use of private correspondence for public purposes. Previously to the late discussion on the documents which have been laid on the table, I had some intimation of the existence, and even of the nature, of such a correspondence; but I thought that the Government might regard it as a correspondence of so confidential a character that it should not be made public, and in that case I considered it my duty not to make use, in this House, of any information which I might privately have obtained. But, my Lords, I am about to refer now to the comments which are made—comments of a very singular character—by the Times newspaper, and, I must say, in passing, that this is not the first occasion upon which the Times newspaper, within the course of the last few months, has pro-
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fessed to be in possession, and has proved to be in possession, of secret and exclusive information which ought to have been known only to the Cabinet; and has also had possession of, or access to, papers which have been refused, and are still refused, to the two Houses of Parliament, and to be at liberty and apparently authorised to make public these documents refused even to Parliament itself. The noble Earl at the head of the Government may, therefore, disclaim as he thinks fit having any communication with the Times newspaper. I do not say whether he has or not. He may have no communication whatever directly and personal himself; but all the noble Earl's disclaimers will not persuade me, or any human being in this country, that the Times newspaper would insert such an article as that I am about to read to your Lordships, or would convey information of the character of that to which I am about to refer, without being informed by a person or persons who had official information on these matters, and who thereby have divulged that which ought to have been a Cabinet secret. The Times says:—
"We are informed that in the course of Lord John Russell's brief administration of the Foreign Office—that is, in January, 1853—Sir Hamilton Seymour was requested by the Emperor, and empowered by his own Government, to enter into a detailed private conversation with the Emperor himself on this subject; and a correspondence ensued, not of an official character, and the secrecy of which does not concern the Emperor alone, but which disclosed in the fullest confidence the views of the Court of St. Petersburg with reference to the approaching dissolution of the Ottoman empire."
The Times refers to previous and present transactions apparently with a full knowledge of the facts, and gives to the communications of the Emperor of Russia the interpretation which I think is likely to be given to them by the country—namely, that the Emperor of Russia did entertain the most ambitious views with regard to Turkey, and had, as he thought, placed himself in a state of identity of action with the British Government. It proceeds:—
"We have not now to learn for the first time that, before the Emperor Nicholas engaged in these extraordinary transactions, he had attempted at various times and in different forms to lure almost every Court in Europe to share in the plunder of Turkey. As long ago as his own visit to this country he held the same language, and it may have been repeated in greater detail in the course of last winter."
Now, mark, the Times newspaper is not

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only in possession of the fact of those communications having been made, of this correspondence having taken place, and of the character and nature of the correspondence—but the Times newspaper appears also to be aware of the fact of an answer having been sent, and of the nature and character of that answer. It goes on:—
"But what answer did he get to these overtures? What answer did he get when he sounded Lord John Russell, of all men in the world, on the subject of an eventual partition of Turkey? We confidently reply, that he was met by an indignant refusal on the part of the British Government. He was told, if we are not greatly mistaken, that this country could entertain no proposal in any form which presupposed the dismemberment of an empire the integrity of which we had frequently engaged to respect and even to protect; that the British Government strenuously opposed any change in the status quo of Turkey, as a source of danger and difficulty to the world; and that, as this communication had been made in a friendly spirit, England strongly recommended the Emperor of Russia to abstain altogether and scrupulously from any interference in the affairs of Turkey, which must be productive of great perils to the world."
How did the Times know anything about this, I should like to know? The article proceeds:—
"As these communications were of a confidential nature, and wholly anterior to and unconnected with the affair of the Holy Places and Prince Menchikoff's mission, the Government appear to have thought that they did not properly form part of the correspondence recently laid before Parliament, but constituted a separate transaction. This challenge of the Russian Government relieves them from all further uncertainty on that point. Lord John Russell's answer to the Russian overture will do him no dishonour; and, although in time of peace it might have been inconvenient to lay bare the pretensions Russia has sometimes indicated, our present relations are not likely to suffer from an 'indiscretion' she herself has provoked; and we trust the whole correspondence will be immediately produced."
Now, my Lords, again I ask, how can any newspaper in this country know what were the particulars of a confidential overture made by a foreign Sovereign to certain Members of the British Government? or how could the Times, or any other paper, know what was the confidential answer of Lord John Russell, a Minister of the Crown, to such a communication? Or how did such a newspaper come into possession of documents of so confidential and exclusive a nature, that the Government, up to the present moment, have felt themselves compelled by a sense of public duty to withhold the knowledge of them from either House of Parliament? It is not, however, to the minor question of
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whether this is or is not an authorised publication that has appeared in the Times newspaper that I am anxious to call the attention of your Lordships, but to a much more important matter. I will assume that the Times is well informed with respect to the nature of the communications and the character of the proposition submitted by the Emperor of Russia, and I will assume also that the reply made to it by Lord John Russell—an assumption which I have the more pleasure and the less hesitation in admitting, because I have confidence in the honourable conduct of the noble Lord, and because I am confident that no other answer could have been given by him to such a communication on the part of the Emperor of Russia. But this is what I require an explanation of. These communications took place, I believe, in the month of February—certainly during the short period in which Lord John Russell held the seals of the Foreign Office. Afterwards a full discussion takes place upon the question of the dispute between Russia and Turkey; the papers on the subject are officially laid upon the table of the House by the Government. I think the noble Earl will do myself and other noble Lords the justice of saying that we have not obstructed any of the measures of the Government by any factious opposition, and that both this and the other House have done nothing calculated to embarrass them. We afforded them every assistance for the prosecution of this war, which we believed might have been avoided, but was then inevitable. I thought the Government open to censure, but I did not do more than give a temperate expression to my opinion on the subject when called upon to discuss the papers laid before Parliament; but I and other noble Lords were sure that Her Majesty's Government were open to charges of having shut their eyes to a state of facts from which they should have anticipated danger. We pointed out the gathering forces of Russia, the threatening language of Menchikoff, the warnings of Colonel Rose and of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. After all these opportunities of knowledge, freedom of discussion, and warnings no less frequent than timely—what was the answer of Government? Her Majesty's Government, in the most solemn manner, by the noble Earl the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, said, "True, we had these facts before us, but if you had known the strength, the solemnity, the apparent sincerity, and the frequent

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repetition of the assurances given by the Government of Russia with respect to Turkey, you would have been convinced, with us, that Russia had no ambitious views whatever—that the question was merely one of the Holy Places. We have been deceived, we admit, but you would have been equally deceived, for no Government could have given stronger or more repeated assurances of a peaceful policy." Now, it was in the month of April last year when the discussions took place in this House on the subject, and the noble Earl with so much gravity and solemnity made these assertions. But what becomes of all these asseverations, if at the same time the Government were in possession of communications of a secret and confifidential nature, disclosing the whole of the Emperor of Russia's views, "unbosoming himself," as we are told, with the utmost absence of reserve, and communicating to the British Government his ultimate designs for the partition of the Turkish empire, which the noble Earl the Secretary for Foreign Affairs was compelled to answer in terms of indignant refusal? I say, I can understand the unity which pervades the papers presented to Parliament—I can understand the reasons for not producing these private and confidential letters for the perusal of Parliament; but when we know of this additional correspondence in the hands of the Government, I cannot understand the assertion of the noble Earl, that up to the month of April, whatever might have been the menacing appearance and suspicious circumstances, Her Majesty's Government had the most entire confidence in the repeated and absolute assurances given to them by the Emperor of Russia—that her policy was not intended to assume an aggressive character. How is that consistent with the fact of the existence of correspondence and confidential communications to which the Foreign Secretary gave a most indignant refusal? These communications were, it appears, placed in the hands of the British Government for the purpose of securing—and, it was believed, did secure—a most entire identity of feeling and opinion between this country and the Emperor of Russia, to the nature of which reference is made in the article in the journal to which I have alluded. There is one other circumstance to which the Times newspaper refers, and, apparently, with some knowledge of the facts. The statement in the Times does not merely refer to the present
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year; it goes on to state that at the period of the Emperor's visit to this country—at the time when the noble Earl now the First Lord of the Treasury filled the office of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs—communications of a similar character took place. Now if that were the case, and if these designs of Russia upon Turkey were made known to the noble Earl who had since succeeded to the post of First Lord of the Treasury, and immediately upon whose accession to office these aggressive projects were put into execution, I want to know what confidence a Government of which the noble Earl was at the head could have had in the representations of Russia with respect to a total absence of all ambitious designs on her part? The questions which I wish to put to the noble Earl are very simple. They are—whether Her Majesty's Government believe the document inserted in the St. Petersburg paper to be an authentic one? Whether such correspondence and communications as are there referred to as being of a confidential character did take place between Her Majesty's Government and the Government of Russia? And, if such correspondence did take place, being now challenged to produce it, and their confidential character having been taken away from them, I ask whether the noble Earl will, in justice to the people of this country, produce the whole of that correspondence, which I do not blame him for not having produced before? I will also ask whether there is any truth in the statement made by a particular paper in this country, to the effect that there were communications of a similar character made in 1844, at the time the Emperor of Russia was in this country? and, if so, whether these communications ever assumed the form of writing? and, if they did, whether the noble Earl is prepared to place these papers also on the table of the House?
THE EARL OF ABERDEEN: My Lords, the statement to which the noble Earl has referred is undoubtedly one of considerable interest and importance; and finding it in the paper, I presume we must consider it as possessing a sort of official character. More than this I know nothing; and the noble Earl is quite as well able as I am to form a conclusion as to the character of that statement. I have seen the statement nowhere else but where it is; and, as I said before, I know no more about it. The communications to which the noble Earl has referred, which took

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place between His Majesty the Emperor of Russia and some of Her Majesty's Ministers, were, as the noble Earl has stated—and that course he has not disapproved—retained by Her Majesty's Government, and not printed with the papers laid on the table, in consequence of the confidential character which was considered to be attached to them. It has not been usual, under circumstances similar to those under which these communications were made—whatever may be the case with communications with foreign Ministers—to lay upon the table of the House a statement of familiar conversations, such as those described, between a Sovereign and a foreign Minister; and for this reason Her Majesty's Government did not think it proper or consistent with that respect and delicacy which they were bound to observe towards a Sovereign with whom we were still in alliance, to produce papers which had a private and confidential character. This statement in the St. Petersburg Journal, which, I conclude, must be considered as in some degree official, in which reference is made to these communications, and by which it appears that there is no reluctance on the part of the Russian Government that Her Majesty's Government should produce and make public all communications which had passed on the subject, relieves Her Majesty's Ministers from much difficulty in treating with the matter, and removes any reasonable scruple they might have entertained relative to the production of the papers to which the noble Earl refers. And not only that: I know no other course; and I am not at all surprised at the course taken by the noble Earl; and I can assure the noble Earl that if he had not made the observations which he has, and no reference had been made to this subject, I should have thought it the duty of Her Majesty's Government to have laid these papers on the table, and stated these communications to your Lordships—the object to retain them and to consider them as private having now ceased. Independent, therefore, of the question of the noble Earl, the whole of this correspondence will be laid upon the table; and I think, upon a perusal of them, the noble Earl will find that there has been little occasion for those observations which he has hypothetically applied to Her Majesty's Government tonight. It will be found, my Lords, I feel assured, that Her Majesty's Government have no reason to regret that they are now
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in the condition to lay the correspondence on the table; and I think the noble Earl will find himself egregiously mistaken in his endeavour to cast blame or imputation of any kind on Her Majesty's Government for the part they have taken in this transaction. Upon that part of the subject I have nothing further to say; the papers will speak for themselves, and your Lordships will be able to form your own judgment from them. The noble Earl has, however, referred to the commentaries made upon the article copied from the St. Petersburg Journal, in a public journal—the Times newspaper. The noble Earl may, perhaps, be surprised—considering, as he does, that a very close connection subsists between that paper and some Members of Her Majesty's Government—or rather what he seems better pleased to call my connection with that journal—to learn that until this morning I never read the article or the comments to which he has referred; and neither directly nor indirectly—and here I feel some advantage in a man's having a character for truth and honour—I have neither directly, nor indirectly the most remote conception of the origin of the article in question, or of the comments which have been made upon it; not the slightest. I can say nothing more about it, except again to repeat that I am entirely ignorant of the source whence the comments alluded to arose; nor can I form an opinion or conjecture on the matter, except this—that I have been given to understand that a clerk in the Foreign Office, but who is not a clerk there now, and who was introduced, by-the-by, by the noble Earl opposite (the Earl of Malmesbury), has scandalously betrayed his duties by revealing the contents of some official documents in the office with which he was connected. That is the way I am informed; but I do not know whether it is through that source or not that this correspondence has been made public, and on which the comments are based to which the noble Earl has attached so much importance. All I can say is, that I have not, directly or indirectly, the slightest knowledge personally of the matter. The first question, then, which the noble Earl has asked, I have already not only answered, but stated that it was the intention of the Government, without having been asked, to do what he has requested. With respect to the other matter to which the noble Earl referred, it is perfectly true that when His Imperial Majesty was in

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this country, several communications—verbal communications—took place between him and the late Duke of Wellington and myself. I am not sure whether any took place with the late Sir Robert Peel, or not; but with respect to the Duke of Wellington and myself, there is no doubt that communications did take place as to the state of affairs in the East, and the views and prospects which might be entertained on the subject. It was, I think, shortly after His Imperial Majesty's visit to this country—indeed I am not sure that it was not about the same time—that Count Nesselrode came here, and embodied those views of the Emperor, and the conversations that had taken place, in a memorandum, which was afterwards reduced to writing. I have not seen that document for the last ten years—from the time when it was written, and probably the noble Earl knows more about it than I do. Not having seen it for so long a period, I am not prepared to say at this moment whether it may be fit or not to lay it on the table; but I shall ascertain. I do not wish to speak about a document I have not seen for so long a period; I may say, however, that I think it is not likely to have much bearing on present circumstances, or that it refers to the dispute about the Holy Places, to the mission of Prince Menchikoff, to the Vienna note, or, indeed, to anything involved in the recent discussions; and therefore I do not think it is at all likely to be of any service at this moment, even if there should be no objection to produce it; but on that point I reserve myself till I have had an opportunity of seeing and considering the document.
THE EARL OF ELLENBOROUGH: My noble Friend states, that during the year 1844, communications took place between the Emperor of Russia and the Duke of Wellington, but that he is not sure whether any such communications took place with Sir Robert Peel. Now, I am able to state that there were communications with Sir R. Peel; for my right hon. Friend communicated to me one point in reference to Turkey on which the Emperor had expressed a very clear opinion. I understood my noble Friend (the Earl of Aberdeen) to say that he knows no more of the document which has been read as coming from St. Petersburg than the noble Earl who asked the question. If that be the case, I would suggest whether he is not premature in promising to lay
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these papers on the table of the House? I think this would better be delayed till he has seen a copy of the St. Petersburg Gazette containing the document; for, as yet, there is no official or certain information that it is genuine.
THE EARL OF ABERDEENwas understood to say he had no doubt of the authenticity of the document.
THE EARL OF ELLENBOROUGHhad understood his noble Friend to say that he knew nothing about it till he saw it in the Times newspaper; but that was not a sufficient authority.
THE MARQUESS OF CLANRICARDEI hope that all the conversations which have been carried on with the Emperor of Russia by Sir Hamilton Seymour on this subject will be laid on your Lordships' table, as well as those communications to which no particular reference has been made; because, undoubtedly, His Imperial Majesty has no right whatever to select one particular part of those conversations, and make them matters of communication intended for this House and the Government, and to debar Her Majesty's Government from having the full advantage that an entire communication would give them. I say this, because it has been current at St. Petersburg, and rumours have been common in the diplomatic and other well-informed circles throughout Europe, that in that conversation a most important communication—important in itself, and important also as regards the conduct of the Government and of Parliament, if it should turn out correct—took place, in which the Emperor of Russia expressed his determination to lose his last soldier and spend the last rouble in his treasury sooner than give up his claims on Turkey. I think the memorandum made by Count Nesselrode, and given to the Foreign Minister of this country in 1844, as stating the views of the Emperor and his Government on the then condition of Turkey, it is of vast importance for us to have. Your Lordships have a full right to know what was the view then entertained by the Emperor, because it is evident that it must bear most strongly on the present circumstances which have rendered war so imminent. I trust that we shall have all the conversations with the noble Earl, who was then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in some shape or other, also before us. It appears impossible we should not; for I think it necessary, for the credit of our Govern-

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ment, that we should be able to show exactly what were the communications made to Her Majesty's Ministers, what was the answer, and what was the language held in 1844, as well as what was the language held by Russia, so as to give a really conclusive answer to the manifesto now published. It is essential that we should know what language has been held; for though this is the first time we have had it put forward in this way, it has been rumoured throughout the whole Continent that language very different from that we have recently taken was held formerly by Ministers of this country, and, among others, by the noble Earl who was then Secretary for Foreign Affairs. It is well, if documentary proof exists, that it should be made available, for the purpose of showing that the Government stands acquitted of inconsistency, as well as of duplicity, in these most momentous and unfortunate transactions.
THE EARL OF MALMESBURY: My Lords, even if I had never held the seals of the Foreign Office, I should on all occasions of this kind have endeavoured so to express myself as to avoid the possibility of embarrassing those who are charged with the administration of our foreign affairs. With reference to the present question, I certainly should not have pressed Her Majesty's Government to produce this correspondence, and I think that, under the circumstances, they were warranted in abstaining from laying it before the House. I will say more than that. I think the great advantages we enjoy from living under a constitutional Government, are somewhat abated at a period like this by the inconvenience which belongs to our position with reference to public affairs, as compared with a Government entirely despotic. I know that a Government which is entirely despotic—a Government resting on the will of one man—can carry on warlike operations with much more secrecy and much more rapidity, and, therefore, with more advantage, than one which has to consult the wishes of two Houses of Parliament. Feeling this most strongly, I have abstained as much as my duty permits me to do from any remarks relative to the great questions and subjects now agitating the country that could possibly be considered factious on my part, or on the part of my noble Friends with whom I have the honour to act. My Lords, I expected, therefore, on the other side—and I must say I have always been met in these
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discussions in the same spirit by the noble Earl now at the Foreign Office—I expected that I should have been met with any other feelings rather than those of hostility, and, let me say, with an expression of rudeness from the other side of the House. The noble Earl (the Earl of Aberdeen), while defending himself from the charge that, whether from indiscretion or from any other cause, he was connected with, or under the suspicion of being connected with the Times newspaper, and that, either directly or indirectly, he had anything to do with putting them in possession of confidential communications, said that these confidential communications had not been given purposely by any Member of the Government, or knowingly by them, but that they had been revealed to the Times—["No, no!"] I understood the noble Earl to say that the Times had obtained this information from—[The Earl of ABERDEEN: NO, no.] Then what did the noble Earl say? Will the noble Earl inform the House what his statement was? The noble Earl said that the only way in which he could account for the knowledge which the Times possessed of transactions which could be known only to the most secret officers of Her Majesty's Government was, that there had been at the Foreign Office a clerk who, either from indiscretion, or still worse motives, had betrayed those State secrets; that that clerk was now no longer a public servant; that he had been dismissed in consequence—["No, no; no longer a clerk."] Well—that he was no longer a clerk; and then, in a tone and manner which nobody in the House could misunderstand, the noble Earl added that the Gentleman had been appointed by me. From the spirit and manner in which he uttered it, the noble Earl seemed to be sure that such was the case. [The Earl of ABERDEEN: I said I had heard so.] The noble Earl had no business to make such a statement unless he were sure of its accuracy. Nothing could be less consonant with the manners that prevail in this House, or with the usage of this House, nor does it agree with the customs which we, as gentlemen, not merely as Peers, observe towards each other, that the noble Earl should in this way have spoken of me as having appointed a man who has betrayed his trust. I wish to know from the noble Earl who that gentleman is. And this leads me to a much more serious consideration. Great and im-

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portant State secrets have been betrayed, as the noble Earl says, by a public servant. A public newspaper is made conversant with these secrets through the treachery of a servant, though the noble Earl does not seem to be sure of it. He will not say that that is the case. But, my Lords, matters have come to this pass, that it is necessary we should know who it is that betrays the public secrets—how it is that Cabinet secrets have oozed out and been filtered through the public offices, and that papers which have been refused to Parliament have found their way into the newspapers, while the Prime Minister of the country does not know how or by whom the Government has been betrayed. My Lords, I think first of all I have a right to ask what is the name of the public servant who has betrayed his trust, and whom I am said to have appointed; and, in the next place, I will take into my serious consideration whether it is not my duty as a Peer and Member of Parliament to move that some searching inquiry shall be made by Parliament, and with all the powers that Parliament is armed with, to ascertain who it is that betrays public secrets to the newspapers, who this person is that has not yet been discovered, and who cannot be named by the noble Earl.
THE EARL OF ABERDEEN: The noble Earl will excuse me from answering his question, for I do not know. He was a clerk in the Foreign Office, but is no longer a clerk; but I did not say he was dismissed. I said I had heard a rumour that it was through his instrumentality that this information had become known; but I did not say he was dismissed, nor do I know his name.
THE EARL OF DERBY: We have it on the statement of the noble Lord, that it is supposed the secrets of the Cabinet have been betrayed by a person in a public situation. It is said that these secrets have been scandalously betrayed by a person appointed by the noble Earl beside me. Now, that person ought clearly to have been dismissed, and if he is not dismissed for this violation of duty, the heads of that office have failed in their duty to the country. Unless, however, the noble Earl was perfectly convinced of the fact—unless he knew that the person so appointed, as he says, by my noble Friend had been guilty of that base treachery to the country—he was not warranted in making the statement he has done; and, if the noble Earl did know, nothing should have prevented
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a man filling his high station of First Lord of the Treasury, in his place in Parliament, and from the Treasury bench, from stigmatising the person who had been so guilty in the face of Parliament and the country.
EARL GREYlooked upon this as a case of very great importance. It was the first time in Parliament that he had ever heard of such a case. He confessed, however, he had seen for some time past, with surprise and very great regret, the sort of official communications that had found place in the newspapers—because this was not the only case. Their Lordships would remember that about a fortnight ago the noble Earl on the upper bench asked a question as to what steps were to be taken with reference to the Russian fleet coining out of the Baltic, and how those ships could be stopped in the absence of a declaration of war. The noble Earl at the head of the Government thought it consistent with his duty to avoid giving any explanation in answer; but the next morning there appeared in the Times newspaper a complete explanation, because they were then informed by the Times that this difficulty of a declaration of war did not exist—that a summons had been addressed to Russia to withdraw her troops from the Principalities, and that if that summons was not attended to, it would be equivalent to a declaration of war. Now, that was a fact of great importance to know, and one which could only have been known to Members of Her Majesty's Government. Now, seeing these official communications in a particular newspaper, and information of such a peculiarly important character, it was hardly satisfactory that they should be told by the noble Earl that he had no knowledge, either directly or indirectly, as to how these communications were made. He did not for one moment doubt the statement of the noble Earl, because the noble Earl had most justly stated that he felt the advantage of having the character of a man of honour; but he thought it important for the honour and dignity of this country that such unauthorised communications should not come out, and that such a scandalous breach of faith as they had now heard of should not be passed over, without some more serious notice being taken of it than appeared to be the case. He did not think that an imputation so grave should have been thrown out on any individual whatever who was said to be in the Foreign Office, but which not being fixed on any

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one individual would hang over the head of every one in that department, and that, too, without the imputation being distinctly made, or the grounds of that imputation being given.
THE EARL OF ELLENBOROUGHsaid, it had been distinctly stated, in answer to a question, that the answer of the Emperor of Russia to the summons given him was not expected to reach this country till the 25th of March. Our fleet sailed on the 11th of March, and if we wait, as we are bound in honour to do, till we have received that answer on the 25th of March, our fleet must have sailed without specific orders. In the meantime the Russian frigates and corvettes might sail out of the Baltic for the purpose of preying on our trade, and might pass through Admiral Napier's squadron untouched. He was not, therefore, surprised that the noble Earl found it inexpedient to answer his question, inasmuch as he could not say at the time whether those ships would be ordered to be stopped or not, as it depended upon the reply to be received from St. Petersburg, which would not reach this country till the 25th of the present month.
EARL FITZWILLIAMsaid, he was afraid that the hypothetical explanation which had been given could hardly be considered to explain the disclosure which had taken place. There had appeared, within the last forty-eight hours, disclosures of certain things in the newspapers, and, unless this person against whom suspicion had been raised had left the office within forty-eight hours, a sufficient explanation would not be given of the paragraph of Saturday to which he referred. He begged to observe on this subject, that it disclosed to the world how mischievously the country submitted to place itself in the hands of the metropolitan press. It was a very serious affair, as it showed they were too much under the dominion of the press. He was very much afraid that Her Majesty's Ministers—that all Ministers, not only those at present in office, but their noble Friends opposite—felt the necessity for courting the public press too greatly to allow of their being as rigorous as they ought to be in their examination of the means by which the press obtained its information. In conclusion, he begged their Lordships to bear in mind that these secrets could not have been disclosed by the clerk, unless he had been in office forty-eight hours before the paragraph alluded to was published.
THE EARL OF MALMESBURY: I have not received at the hands of the noble Earl (the Earl of Aberdeen) the justice that I expected. After having made such a charge, I expected, if not for my sake as responsible for the appointment of the gentleman, yet for the sake of those other gentlemen on whom, as has been said, the charge will rest, that the noble Earl would have named the gentleman to whom he has alluded. I appointed two or three clerks, and if the noble Earl conceals the name of the party in this instance, on them will the stigma of this charge in the Foreign Office rest. I beg your Lordships to remember one thing. I have been told that the appointment of the gentleman in question was made by me; now, if the custom still prevails that did when I held the seals of the Foreign Office, the person alluded to, whichever of them it may be, must have been quite at the bottom of the list of clerks occupied in copying documents on very important matters. It is therefore impossible, or almost impossible, and it is wrong, that they should have been acquainted with correspondence of such an important and confidential nature as that to which the noble Earl has alluded. Looking at the circumstantial evidence of the case—as the noble Earl refuses or is unable to give me further information on the assertion made by him most unwarrantably—I say, looking at the circumstantial evidence of the case, it is almost impossible that any young man appointed but for two years could have been cognisant of this correspondence, and, consequently, almost impossible that he should have revealed it.

THE CIVIL SERVICE.
LORD MONTEAGLE: In making the Motion of which I have given notice respecting the alterations proposed in the Civil Service of the Empire, I must be allowed to offer a few remarks on the very exciting discussion which has just closed. My Lords, that debate, in two respects, connects itself with the argument I am now about to address to the House. The suspicion expressed by the First Lord of the Treasury, that there may have been a "scandalous betrayal of public trust" on the part of some individual, who at a former period formed part of the establishment of the Foreign Office, might, if established by evidence, appear inconsistent with the honour, ability, and trustworthiness, which I believe to be the characteristics of the Civil Service of Eng-

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land; and some cautious men might, perhaps, think, that it would be more prudent, on my part, to postpone the present Motion, till this question of the Foreign Office shall be finally discussed and disposed of. But I am not of that opinion. The charge made by the First Lord of the Treasury is not stated as a matter of fact, but as one of grave suspicion. It is not proved, or attempted to be proved; nor is the name of the person suspected given to the House. But even were the circumstances wholly different, and the imputed offence proved to have been committed, though I should deeply deplore so lamentable, and so unprecedented an occurrence, I yet feel so perfect a reliance on the high and honourable characters of the thousands of excellent men engaged in the Civil Service of the Crown, that I should still deny that the merits of their case could in justice be affected by one single unfortunate exception. But I repeat it, nothing is before the House at present, beyond the suspicion expressed by the head of the Government. There is a second point of analogy between the case stated by the noble Earl (the Earl of Malmesbury), and that which I propose to discuss. He has strongly animadverted on the practice of placing in the hands of persons connected with the press, public documents intended for the use of Parliament; and doing this long before the documents themselves are in your Lordships' possession, or in that of the House of Commons. To this I object, as not only disrespectful to the Legislature, but also as being inexpedient and unjust, calculated to preoccupy the public mind, and to create a prejudice for or against any question, so as to impede its fair discussion. Of this the present case affords a striking example. The Report on the Civil Service, which renders my Motion necessary, was laid before your Lordships on the 24th of February. But, already, on the 9th of the same month, before it had been made known to any one of your Lordships, the very Report itself must have been placed by its framers, or by some person on their behalf, in the hands of newspaper editors, who described minutely all its main provisions and commented on all its recommendations. That these newspaper paragraphs are traceable to an official source is certain from internal evidence. Words are used in the newspaper paragraph, and facts are referred to, which could only have been de-
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rived from the Report itself; and these are coupled with the most insulting expressions to the Civil Service, which is described as characterised by its "incapacity, its indifference, and its idleness; as owing its origin chiefly to private interest, or to political venality, and remarkable for neglected duties, and for a supercilious demeanour." It will be my duty to show to your Lordships, that the imputations contained in the official Report and in the newspaper paragraph are indefensible and unjust. Nor can any indulgence be claimed by either on the ground of haste, want of knowledge, or inadvertence. This inquiry was carried on by official men; it commenced in November, 1848, and the final Report bears date in January, 1854. Thus, more than five years have been given to the inquiry, and no excuse is left for mistake, and still less for misrepresentation. Your Lordships have now before you, a Report which claims the character of being final; and which bears the signatures of Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan. I am happy, however, to perceive that, as yet, the Government are not committed to the adoption of this proposal. It is true, that in Her Majesty's Speech, at the opening of the Session, our attention was directed to the state of the Civil Service; but whilst, in the earlier sections of the Report, we find Orders in Council and Treasury Minutes, adopting certain recommendations of the Commissioners, no Government assent has been given, as yet, to the final Report. It is on that account that I feel it to be the more my urgent duty to call the attention of the House and of the Ministers to the subject. I shall be well repaid if I can avert the dangers consequent on a rash adoption of the plan proposed. Time for deliberation must be taken. No Government could venture to act upon the documents now laid before Parliament. The inquiry is incomplete, or worse than incomplete. Eleven public offices only are noticed in the papers before us; some of these are not the most important to the public service. But of the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Pay Office, the Office of Woods, the Mint, the Horse Guards, and various other important departments, we know nothing. The Report is silent. I must be permitted to ask the Government whether the inquiries of the Commissioners have, or have not, extended to many of these last-named departments? If no such inquiries

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have been made, it is premature to call upon Parliament to legislate upon incomplete evidence; but if, as I believe, there have been further inquiries on some of these departments, the result of which is withheld or suppressed, the objection against legislation is still more conclusive. In the first case your Lordships are invited to remodel the whole Civil Service upon incomplete evidence. In the second case, you are called upon to do so on evidence which must be considered to be not only incomplete, but partial and ex parte. Unless I am contradicted, upon official authority, I feel warranted in assuming the fact to be, that important departments have been examined, but that the result of such inquiry is not forthcoming. How is this to be justified? I invite a contradiction, if I am in error.
The Report before the House may be considered in two distinct points of view—the first, the statement of evil and abuse alleged by the Commissioners to exist; the second, the remedy proposed, upon the Commissioners' authority. I shall discuss these two questions separately.
I. I should be wanting in all frankness if I did not at the outset deny the accuracy of the statement of supposed abuse which the Commissioners have laid before your Lordships. I must here remark, that their statement is unsustained by any evidence, and rests exclusively upon the assertions of the Commissioners themselves. We are not favoured with the testimony of one single practical witness; no documents are referred to; yet the Commissioners seem to admit the necessity of evidence, for they have appended to their Report, as supporting their views, a letter from the Rev. Mr. Jowitt, Fellow and tutor of Balliol, Oxford. Far be it from me to question the high authority of this most respectable and learned gentleman; but I may be permitted to doubt whether his knowledge of the Civil Service of the empire be such as to give any conclusive weight to his opinions on the present occasion. The Civil Service of the country, we are informed, consists of 16,000 persons. I doubt whether the Tutor of Balliol can know much either of their conduct or of their duties. I admit, however, that the number is grossly exaggerated, unless it is made to include a large class of inferior officers, who can scarcely be considered to form part of what is generally understood as the Civil Service. For gaugers, lockers, weighers, tidewaiters, and messengers, little
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more can be required, on their appointment, than good character, reading, writing, and a knowledge of the mysteries of the rule of three, and of vulgar and decimal fractions. The Civil Service, with which it is my object to deal, comprises, if not so large a body as 16,000, yet a very considerable number of gentlemen charged with most important public functions. These functions cannot be more fairly stated than by the Commissioners themselves. The words are as follows:—
"The Government of the country could not be carried on without the aid of an efficient body of permanent officers, occupying a position subordinate to that of the Ministers, yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability, and experience, to be able to advise, assist, and, to some extent, influence those who are set over them."
I consider this to be a fair description of the Civil Service of England. Your Lordships will attend to the words I have read. The duties described are far from being exclusively mechanical or executive. Our civil servants are called upon not only to obey, but to advise and to influence the Ministers, under whom they serve. Their experience cannot but produce practical consequences upon a political body, which, though superior in authority, is in its nature fluctuating and transitory.
I shall next invite your attention to the description given by the Commissioners of the class of men selected for these responsible duties, and the mode in which it is somewhat rashly affirmed that these duties are performed. To avoid the possibility of mistake or of misstatement, I beg leave to read the very words of the Commissioners:—
"It would be natural to expect that so important a profession would attract the ablest and most ambitious of the youth, and that those of superior qualifications would rapidly rise to distinction. Such is by no means the case. It is for the unambitious, the indolent, and the incapable, that the Civil Service is chiefly desired. Those whose abilities do not warrant an expectation that they will succeed in open professions, in competition with their contemporaries, and those whom indolence of temperament or physical infirmities unfit for active exertion, are placed in the civil service, where they may obtain an honourable livelihood with little labour and no risk. The comparative lightness of the work, and the certainty of provision in case of retirement, owing to bodily incapacity, furnish strong inducements to parents and friends of sickly youths to obtain employment in the service of the Government. The extent to which the public are consequently burthened would hardly be credited."
It is true that the Commissioners guard themselves against the supposition that

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this censure is universally applied, but their mode of drawing an exception only aggravates the bitterness of their unfavourable judgment. They proceed as follows:—
"It is not our intention to suggest that all public servants entered with such views, but, as regards a large portion of them, these motives, more or less, influenced those who acted for them in the choice of a profession, and there are probably very few who have chosen this line of life with a view of raising themselves to public eminence. The result is, the public service suffers in internal efficiency and public estimation. It is thus we hear of official delays, official evasions of difficulty, and official indisposition to provement."
I now ask whether a more severe imputation could possibly have been made, not only against the class of civil servants, but against the whole social condition of this country. I call upon those noble Lords who now hold, or have held at any previous time, high and responsible office, to say whether the words I have read convey a faithful and just description of the civil service, or whether, on the contrary, they do not involve in one sweeping accusation all successive Governments, the heads of the highest departments, who are supposed to abuse their patronage, the civil servants themselves, who are represented as incapable of discharging their duties, and even the parents of those civil servants, who speculate on their infirmities. Is it true that these gentlemen are principally the unambitious, the indolent, and the incapable? Are they chiefly men whose abilities do not warrant an expectation of success in competition with their contemporaries? Are they placed in the civil service from their indolence of temperament or their physical debility? Is the livelihood they earn one of comparative lightness of work? and is their governing motive the probability of an early retired allowance? I deny each of these allegations. It is now more than a quarter of a century since I first entered official life. I have passed through many of the important offices of the State, and, as a witness, I most solemnly assure your Lordships that I have seen nothing among the gentlemen filling the executive offices in the public service which in any respect justifies these sweeping denunciations. Let us consider this imputation, which, if true, would imply the lowest and most sordid conduct. Is it to be credited that it is young men in infirm health who accept office for the sake of obtaining an early allowance, and who thus contemptibly en-
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deavour to make a profit of their incapacities and infirmities? Not only is this assertion utterly unfounded, but it could not, by possibility, be true. The completion of ten years' service is the preliminary condition, without which no retired allowance can be granted, and which is then granted only after a ten years' contribution to the superannuation fund. During my official life I have known very many public servants, but have not yet found one coming under the description of the Commissioners. But I have met with cases of a very opposite kind, and I have seen men of this stigmatised class perishing by incises from their energetic devotion to the public service. I have witnessed, for example, the case of a gentleman, now no more (the hon. Colonel James Stuart), a near relative of a Member of your Lordships' House (the Earl of Galloway). After a distinguished military career in the Peninsula, Colonel Stuart was selected by the Duke of Wellington to fill, in succession, civil offices of high responsibility and great labour. He served in the Stamp Office, in the Customs, and, finally, as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. It was in the latter department that I had the fullest opportunity of witnessing his able and most conscientious exertions. Enfeebled in health, his strength decaying daily, he never neglected a duty, or performed a duty with carelessness. He sunk under the weight of his official labours, and he fell as truly in the service of his country as if he had perished on the field of Waterloo. Again let me take the case of my valued friend Sir Alexander Spearman. His brilliant abilities and unexampled energy were devoted to the laborious duties in which he succeeded Colonel Stuart. Promoted by a Government with whom he had no political connection, selected for his personal merits only, his constitution gave way. His life was despaired of; he was only saved by the combination of great professional skill and his own courage and patience. He obtained his retired allowance and a well-merited honorary distinction; his case was brought specially under the notice of the House of Commons, and his services were universally acknowledged. But was this all? By no means. Sir Alexander Spearman had well earned his retirement; but did he, on restoration to health, seek inactively to enjoy the income so honourably earned? On the contrary, he felt what was due to his country. When restored to

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health, he returned to that country's service, and is once more, I rejoice to think, a useful and energetic public servant, and this too (be it observed) without any augmentation of his former emoluments. Your Lordships will permit me to give you another honourable instance of the same public spirit. The late Mr. Richmond had risen from the executive departments of the Customs to the office of Commissioner. He had accomplished the period which entitled him to a retirement on full pay; his services, as well as his age, would have warranted him in claiming an honourable retreat. So far, however, from doing so, he continued strenuously to fulfil his laborious and responsible duties, and he may thus be considered to have given to England many years of gratuitous service. I might continue these examples—the same in kind—if not of the same surpassing excellence, but I feel that I have said enough to prove that indolence, incapacity, and self-interest are not the characteristics of the civil servants of the Crown.
Bearing these examples in mind, I must again appeal to those who are, as well as those who have been, in office, to reply to the general impeachment of a class of persons whose merits they must have learned by experience how to appreciate. The position of the civil servants is in many points peculiar. In the more ostensible departments of the State, in Parliamentary life, in the Army, Navy, or at the bar, the voice of public fame, and an universal recognition of services, attend and reward superior endowments. It is otherwise in the more secluded walks of the Civil Service. The members of that body may toil, they may succeed; but, poorly requited, their worth is frequently unknown, their services are too often unacknowledged. A French writer has said, "It is the brazen wheel which turns the golden hand." I object to this epigrammatic description, so far as the apportionment of the metals—an apportionment which I have sometimes seen reversed; but, however that may be, the world is apt to forget the efficient machinery, in looking only at the dial plate. The injustice of the system goes further than mere forgetfulness. The world is not only, in such cases, frequently insensible, but it is too often unjust likewise. In years which are passed away, I myself have heard despatches quoted with admiration, described as unrivalled State papers, the whole merit of which was ascribed to the Minister whose name they bore, whilst at the same time the civil
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servant, whose hand had traced every sentence, was left without public honour and estimation, and yet, at the same moment, was, by a capricious public, held responsible and attacked as the author of every unpopular scheme of policy which proceeded from his department. I allude more especially to the case of that eminent man, Sir James Stephen. His example affords in itself an abundant refutation of the statement of the Commissioners that lightness of work is one of the attractions of the Civil Service, and want of capacity its qualification. To those who, like myself, have had the opportunity of witnessing the unflinching labour, as well as the high abilities, of the distinguished man I have just named, the supposition of lightness of labour in public life is as ludicrous as the supposed incapacity of public officers.
Though the cases which I have stated cannot in fairness be taken as exponents of the 16,000 officers referred to in the Report, they serve as examples to show the spirit which exists in our Civil Service, and the men it has produced; I consider that service an honour to the country to which it belongs, and deserving of the favour and confidence of the Crown under which it acts. I respectfully warn your Lordships that you cannot permit the Civil Service to be disorganised without risking the disorganisation of the country itself. I state this unreservedly, and challenge all contradiction. I consider the Report to be a violent attack on meritorious persons, who are held up as undeserving of public confidence and respect. So erroneous and inaccurate a statement cannot surely form a sufficient basis to justify a change of system; still less can it justify the Government in adopting the extraordinary changes recommended by the Commissioners. Their recommendation is founded upon a mistrust of all the statesmen who are at present, or who have been, in the service of the Crown. If this were just, surely the reform ought not to be confined to the clerks, but should extend to the higher, from the more subordinate, officers of the State. If the heads of departments were so unworthy of trust as to be careless in discriminating between the meritorious and the unworthy, between the efficient and the incapable, Parliament would certainly be bound to enforce a reform; but the House would do well to consider whether, even on that supposition, the change suggested would be effectual.

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What was that change? It was no less than the institution of a Central Board of Examiners, of whom your Lordships are told nothing, excepting that its President is to be of Privy Councillor's rank. My first objection is, that this Minos, Æacus, and Rhadamanthus tribunal, would practically become irresponsible; in accepting or in rejecting, they must necessarily exercise an unrestrained discretion, for which it would be nearly impossible to call them to account. Now, I contend further, that this mere examination, even though accompanied by written certificates of character, age, and health, however it might afford some means of ascertaining the amount of a candidate's acquirements at a given time, would not constitute any real test of that candidate's capacity for the public service, of his industry, obedience to discipline, discretion, or moral character. Yet these are the qualifications indispensably required in our public departments. If I am told that this objection is inconsistent with the legislation of last year, respecting admissions to the East Indian service, and is inconsistent with the principle which I then avowed, my answer is immediate, and, as it seems to me, conclusive. The examination of candidates for Haileybury was only proposed as a matriculation for entrance into a college. Before the candidate for a writership could obtain a civil appointment, a severe course of study, continued for two or three years, was required as his necessary qualification. This distinguishes the two cases. In an examination like that now proposed I have no doubt that students, "ingeniously examined," might frequently succeed, in preference to competitors infinitely their superiors. It might be very possible that the Duke of Wellington and Lord Melbourne should have found candidates, who, on mere examination, were apparently as well qualified for the office of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, as my friend Sir Alexander Spearman, or the lamented Colonel Stuart; but I much doubt whether equally efficient public servants could have been obtained otherwise than by personal knowledge and moral discrimination. I should feel it rash to trust to the result of a formal examination in filling up any office which might be within my gift. Even if it could be said, that the heads of departments were not to be morally trusted in the selection of their own clerks, it should be remembered that they must ever be the persons prima-
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rily interested in securing the best instruments for performing their own duties. In this particular case their interest is identified with that of the public. In a conversation I lately had with Mr. Panizzi of the British Museum, that gentleman, who possesses great experience and is a high authority on such a subject, assured me that, if in the choice of his assistants, vacancies were filled up according to the results of a mere examination, though he might obtain men who had answered the greatest number of difficult questions, and had perhaps displayed the deepest erudition, yet they would not be found the most competent for the duties of the library. I am far from meaning to deny that, under certain conditions, examinations may be useful. It is against the proposed system that I protest. It is proposed to apply this test not only to first appointments, but to promotions on vacancies. This renders the proposal still more objectionable; for how could a clerk's claim for promotion be decided on except by those who had experience of his conduct whilst in office. The step proposed is one of the most important which your Lordships have ever been called upon to sanction. It is in fact a transfer of the whole patronage of the Crown to three irresponsible gentlemen, who can practically know but little of the peculiar business and duties of many of the public departments. I should be ashamed of myself indeed, were I to undervalue an enlarged course of study; but I confess I am somewhat alarmed when I find classical literature, mathematics, and their practical application to natural science, political economy, law, moral philosophy, modern languages, modern history, and international law included in these examinations. Some whimsical results might possibly ensue. I shall illustrate this by a reference to one subject only. It may, perhaps, be suspected that the examinations on political economy might bear a certain analogy to the opinions of successive Governments. Supposing young clerks to be admitted into the Board of Trade under the auspices of Protectionist Ministers, if any such, indeed, are now to be found, what able papers would be produced before the examiners in defence of sliding scales, discriminating duties, and the old colonial system. On the contrary, if free trade is to remain in the ascendant, would not the examination papers inevitably furnish an equally able defence of the doctrines of freedom of exchange and of the

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most unfettered commercial intercourse between nations? Would it be possible under such a system to preserve anything like a steady continuity in the public service.
Can the Government furnish any precedent for the system which their Commissioners recommended? I believe that the only country in Europe which has adopted a similar plan is Prussia. I should like to know from Her Majesty's Government whether they can produce any report from the British Minister at Berlin, or from our consular agents at Memel, to prove that the system has been successful. What if we should be told, on the contrary, that it had led to an intolerable bureaucracy, inconsistent with the public interests and counteracting the ends for which it was instituted?
But I must in candour admit that there is another precedent, and that a precedent coming from a great, if not a flourishing empire. The wise men came from the East, and it may be thought by the Commissioners that wisdom comes from the same point of the compass. The only precedent which exactly applies is that of the empire of China. On this authority the Commissioners may rely, and I will not deprive them of its authority. I do not, however, feel very certain that the present internal condition of the flowery empire is such as to justify us in placing an unlimited reliance on the triumphs of its internal administration. I doubt whether the ministerial mandarins have shown themselves to be very pure or very efficient, although they earn their red and blue buttons and their peacock's feather by an unlimited competition. I doubt whether their system of government has encreased the wealth, secured the prosperity of the empire, or advanced the intellectual progress and happiness of its people. In default of official evidence on this subject, I beg to call your Lordships' attention to one of the latest, and, I believe, one of the most authentic descriptions given of the system of examinations for official appointments as now practised in the celestial empire, being the only part of the world in which the recommendations of Sir C. Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote have been consistently adopted. The author whom I am about to quote is Mr. Medhurst, a gentleman employed for some years under the London Missionary Society. This author states that—
"One half of the male population are able to read, and this prevalence of learning is ascribable
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to the general examinations, none being admitted to office but those who have passed the ordeal; the degrees granted are four:—1st, those of cultivated talent; 2nd, elevated persons; 3rd, advanced scholars; 4th, the forest of pencils, or National Institute. The first of these is conferred in a country town; the second, in the provincial cities; the third, in the capital; and the fourth, in the Emperor's palace."
Such is the literary hierarchy of China; and Mr. Medhurst proceeds to describe its effects:—
"In each of the 1,518 districts 1,000 persons try their skill; two per cent of the male adults take part in these examinations, in the course of which essays, odes, &c., are called for, and the successful obtain what is called a name in the village. They are then examined before the Chancellor for their first degree, being searched on entering the town-hall, to prevent the carrying in of books or papers. Themes are again given out in prose or poetry, the Chancellor selecting the best. On obtaining the first degree, the graduate is exempted from corporal punishment, and can only be in future chastised by the Chancellor himself."
I know not whether the Commissioners propose to reserve analogous functions for my noble Friend on the woolsack. The exemption from vulgar punishment, and the prudence which substitutes the Chinese Court of Chancery as the greatest of all inflictions, is applied to the first degree of students, for the successful graduates are not as yet admitted to official honours. For the second degree there are examinations held every three years, at which there are generally 10,000 candidates for the rank of "elevated men;" such is the anxiety felt in mounting what is called another step of the "cloudy ladder." This title would appear to be well given to the Chinese system of examination:—
"The 'literary arena' is now provided with several thousand small cells, into which the competitors are introduced guarded by soldiers, to prevent collusion or communication."
In many respects, it will be seen that this plan resembles that of Sir C. Trevelyan in its itinerant examiners, and in its rural and provincial examinations; for the British Privy Councillor and his colleagues are intended to have a staff of sub-examiners visiting the country, as well as the town. The tests of merit are likewise still of a literary character. Mr. Medhurst continues:—
"Themes in prose, and poetical effusions are again required; and twelve elevated men are chosen out of 10,000 competitors. Splendid apparel is provided for them; to-day they are dwelling in an humble cottage, to-morrow in palaces, riding in sedans, or on horseback."
Sir C. Trevelyan's rewards are more prac-

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tical—the successful candidates are placed in Whitehall or Downing Street:—
"For the third degree, 10,000 candidates enter the lists; on attaining which they become eligible to office, and are generally appointed."
Is it very possible to realise the introduction of such a system in England? Can we easily fancy 10,000 persons presenting themselves before Sir C. Trevelyan and his colleague for examination at Birmingham, or at Liverpool? Mr. Medhurst next proceeds to describe the attainment of the fourth degree:—
"The 300 advanced scholars enter the court of the Forest of Pencils; they compose essays on given themes; they are considered the cream of the country, and are generally appointed to the highest offices. The chief excellence of the essays consists in the number of quotations, and the further they go back for recondite and unusual expressions the better. The candidates are deprived of every scrap of writing, and are expected to carry their library, to use their own phrase, in their stomachs."
I now pray your Lordships' attention to the results of this elaborate Chinese system. Though Mr. Medhurst praises it, he admits that, to a certain extent at least, it is a delusion. I should suspect that it merited the coarse title of an official humbug, which I may be permitted to apply to the Chinese system—not extending it beyond that limit, from the respect which is due to the authority of the British Commissioners. Mr. Medhurst's words are as follows:—
"The disadvantage of the system is the contracted range of their literature; a pertinacious attachment to the ancients, without fostering genius or invention; Nature, with all her stores, continues unexplored; the results of the inductive philosophy are neglected and unattended to; the human mind is fettered, and no advancement is made in science."
Such are the effects of a system which comes recommended to us as the greatest incentive to an improved education. Further evils are, however, superadded; we have seen that solitary confinement in separate cells, and the interposition of the military and the police, are resorted to, in order to check fraud. All this carefulness, Mr. Medhurst informs us, is insufficient and unsuccessful. "Another disadvantage is," he observes,
"That, notwithstanding the laws, and vigilance of the magistrates, ways and means are discovered frequently of bribing the police, and of inducing some candidates, more desirous of present advantage than of future fame, to compose essays for their companions."
I have dwelt upon this Chinese precedent,
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because it is the only one in point; but I apologise to your Lordships for the length to which it has led me.
In conclusion, I must ask, is there any one among your Lordships who has had experience in the public service, who is disposed to acquiesce in the wide-spread stigma cast by this Report on the civil servants of the Crown—those men on whose exertion and knowledge you have relied in times past—those on whom you must be obliged to rely to-morrow? Will the First Lord of the Treasury below me, or will my noble Friend opposite (the Earl of Derby), assert, that this Report gives a just description of our public servants? Or can any Member, either of this or of the other House of Parliament, deny that this Report is a perversion and exaggeration of facts? I appeal more particularly to the noble Earl at the head of the Government, because he has been placed as chief of the Colonial and the Foreign Offices, and now of the Treasury. I appeal to the noble Lords opposite, and more especially to such as have had large experience in public departments, to decide whether the statements in the Report are accurate or the reverse. I call upon them as my witnesses, and feel certain what must be their reply. Do not, then, let this Report go forth uncontradicted; not merely because it is an attack upon the gentlemen of the Civil Service of England, but because it is an attack, also, upon the social state of our country with which that Civil Service is connected, and of which, to a certain extent, it may be considered as the representative. It should be remembered, that these charges have not been brought forward on the sudden, or in the heat of debate; they are the result of an official inquiry of four years, they are made by gentlemen sitting calmly in their armchairs, and being themselves members of the service which they thus publicly denounce. My conviction is, that the statements in this Report are unjust, and that, even if just in some few exceptional cases, these are wholly insufficient to serve as a basis for our legislation. I rely upon the justice and impartiality of the public; I rely upon the regard for the public interests which distinguishes Members both of this and the other House of Parliament, to protect the Civil Service against undeserved imputations. I rely upon the same causes as a security, if called upon to legislate, against any legislating upon evidence taken ex parte, partly laid before us and partly withheld. So to legislate would

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neither be expedient, fair, nor just; it would be still more unfortunate when your Lordships remember that I have already proved to you that this charge, involving, as it does, the character of so many deserving men, has been communicated to the public, in an aggravated form, through the medium of a public journal, on the 9th of February, whilst the Report itself was not presented to your Lordships till the 24th. During this interval, an endeavour has been made to prejudice the public mind; during this interval, the persons aggrieved had no power of making any reply. I do not pretend to speak on their behalf. I have had no communications with them which could authorise me to do so, but I speak on behalf of the public, who have reaped the benefit of their services; I speak on behalf of truth and justice, and my strongest motive is, a conviction of the gratitude due from your Lordships and from England to the class of civil servants whom the Report on the table has so cruelly and so wantonly attacked.
Moved—
"That there be laid before this House, Copy of instructions given to the Commissioners who have reported on the state of the Civil Service, and of the evidence taken before them."
EARL GRANVILLEsaid that it was easy for him to give an answer to the Motion of the noble Lord who had just resumed his seat, because there was no objection on the part of the Government to lay on the table of the House a copy of the instructions given to the Commissioners, which were very short; but with regard to the second part of the noble Lord's Motion, relating to the evidence given before the Commission, he had to inform their Lordships that none of it had been taken down in shorthand—it was not deemed expedient to do so; and this was the course usually taken in inquiries of this nature. He recollected that on the first Commission of Inquiry into a public office on which he (Earl Granville) sat, he had the valuable assistance of Sir Alexander Spearman, who suggested that it was not desirable to have a shorthand writer in the room while the members of an office were being examined, because public officers would have considerable reluctance to express their opinions fully with respect to their department when every word was taken down before their eyes. With respect to the speech of the noble Lord on the present occasion, it had placed him (Earl Granville)
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in a singular predicament. Anybody unacquainted with the circumstances, who had entered the House during its delivery, and had heard the noble Lord's opening complaint of want of information with respect to the Government plan—though it must have struck their Lordships that he afterwards gave a tolerably minute account of it—would have been warranted in supposing that he (Earl Granville) had called upon their Lordships to assent to the second, if not to the third, reading of some Bill. Instead of that, all that had been done was to submit to the House, by Her Majesty's commands, and in fulfilment of a promise in Her Majesty's most gracious Speech from the Throne, a certain Report which had been made upon the state of the public offices in general, together with other Reports upon particular offices. At this stage of the proceedings, at that hour of the evening, and with the small attendance of Peers then present, it would certainly be much more agreeable to him (Earl Granville) to leave the noble Lord's speech entirely unanswered; but, looking to the time and pains that the noble Lord had obviously expended in the preparation of his statement, and the eloquence, not unmingled with sarcasm, with which he had enforced his views, he (Earl Granville) thought it would be hardly fair were he not to say something on behalf of those who had certainly in contemplation a plan somewhat of the kind which he had described. On the other hand, it was evident that it would be impossible for him to enter into details. He was debarred from stating where the noble Lord was right and where he was wrong in his anticipations as to the character of the measure, or where Her Majesty's Government agreed and where they disagreed with the Report; nor could he enter into details and comments without anticipating those explanations which could only be properly given when the measure should be laid before Parliament for consideration. The noble Lord had passed an eloquent eulogium upon the Civil Service of the country, and he (Earl Granville) was sure that he did not expect him to answer that by heaping wholesale attack upon them. At the same time, he was far from saying that the Commissioners, who really had gone carefully into all these different offices, had, in a wanton manner, preferred charges against the Civil Service of the country. What he believed was this—that, from the mode in which the appointments were made, both

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gentlemen and persons of a lower class found their way into the service, and that the latter owed their preferments not to any exertions or merit of their own. With respect, too, to the other class, it might be said, without disrespect to the service, that, of the class of gentlemen, under the present system, the best persons in a family did not seek to go into the public service. He did not intend to say that the service did not eventually turn out excellent officers; but he asked whether, if a father with three or four sons were offered a Government clerkship for one of them, he would put the most able and industrious into the place, or whether he would not put in the one who was least likely to succeed in open competition in the world? One of the great defects of the present system was that there were in every office a certain number of men who did very little, while another portion, who were the "willing horses," took the whole work on themselves. He knew this was the case with Sir S. Northcote himself, who, by the excess of work that he took upon himself in a public office, almost brought himself to the brink of the grave. This state of things was productive of practical injustice; for while the man who contented himself with attending during office hours, and took little of the intellectual labour, was perhaps overpaid, the hard-working and intellectual man was paid too little for the services which he rendered, for which, indeed, he received a remuneration less than he would get if he went into a private merchant's office, certainly into the office of a public company. He could not rate his own personal experience as anything, but still he could not help remarking one fact, which he would illustrate by reference to a particular office. The Board of Trade, where he was for a little time, was, he believed, one of the offices which had most secured the goodwill of the public; and it was the fact that nearly all the gentlemen in that office who had become famous in the country, from Mr. Deacon Hume downwards, had been gentlemen not brought up in the Civil Service. Now, be must say, that there was evidently something quite wrong in this. He quite agreed with what was said by a noble and learned Lord (Lord Brougham) on a former night, that it was the head of an office who should be responsible for the clerks employed under him. But this was not the case now. The noble Lord (Lord Monteagle), having been Chancellor of the Exchequer, ought
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to be aware of this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had nothing to do with the selection of the clerks in his office, though he had the sole management of them; and the noble Marquess who sat near him (the Marquess of Clanricarde), who had been Postmaster General, knew that the Postmaster General, though in the same position, had nothing to do with the appointment of a large portion of the clerks under his direction. The establishment of a system of previous examination would not necessarily denude the heads of office from responsibility. It would be the duty of the Government Board to examine into, and sift the qualifications, character, &c., of the candidates for admission; and afterwards the responsibility should rest on the chiefs of offices, of promoting deserving individuals from office to office. He thought it was most essential that responsibility should lie, to the greatest possible degree, on the head of the office. He thought, too, that it would be quite wrong that the chief of an office should not have the power of looking elsewhere than to those admitted by competition when the public necessities required it. By these means the heads of offices would have a larger field from which to make selections for special offices than they possessed at present. The objections urged against the Civil Service generally could hardly be said to apply to the Foreign Office. During the time he held the post of Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, some years ago, he had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the singular ability, devotion, and industry of the clerks employed in that department; and he could hardly express, in terms sufficiently strong, his gratitude to those filling the more important posts for the assistance he later derived from them. It must be recollected, however, that the Foreign Office was peculiar in its business and constitution. The mere copying in that office was labour of an intellectual character. Generally speaking, some of the ablest men in the State were appointed Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, and much of the efficiency of that department was owing to the exertions of Mr. Canning and Lord Palmerston. He could not help, in connection with that subject, noticing a slight inconsistency between the conduct and the arguments of his noble Friend (Lord Monteagle). When he was at the Foreign Office, he inquired which of the junior clerks had most distinguished himself, and proved his fitness for a higher rank, and a son

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of his noble Friend was pointed out to him in reply. Now, the course which the noble Lord had taken with respect to his own son was an indirect testimony in favour of the system of previous examination. When the noble Lord was offered a clerkship for his son, instead of putting him in the office directly, he asked permission for him to remain at Cambridge some time longer, in order that he might finish his studies and go through the necessary examinations with the view of better fitting him for the discharge of his duties in the Foreign Office. He thought, however, that this was scarcely consistent with the conduct of his noble Friend, in trying to throw discredit on a scheme for the establishment of a public examination as a test for merit in Government appointments, before it was fairly hatched and given to the public view. He could not help thinking, too, that his noble Friend was now acting a little inconsistently with the vote which he gave last year for throwing open the Indian Civil Service to examination. His noble Friend's authority was, no doubt, very great; but had he (Earl Granville) not been able to find a single authority in his favour amongst the permanent civil servants of the Crown he should not feel disheartened on that account, when he recollected how long the most eminent lawyers, with but few exceptions, had opposed all improvements in legal education. If the whole Civil Service disapproved the proposed change, it would not be conclusive against its expediency. The reverse, however, was the fact. Sir James Stephen, one of the most eminent of the civil servants of the Crown, was an ardent supporter of the Government scheme. Mr. John Wood, the Chairman of the Board of Excise, was another. This gentleman was no light authority; he passed part of his life in a mercantile house; he then became one of the most respected Members of the House of Commons, and was now one of the most able civil servants of the Crown. Not only had Mr. Wood stated his opinion in favour of the Government scheme as a means of securing efficiency, but he said that, looking at the matter in a moral point of view, the advantages of taking away patronage were incalculable. Mr. John Mill, of the India House, who was not only a great philosophical writer, but one of the most able administrators of the day, cordially approved of the introduction of examinations and competition. He (Earl Granville) was alarmed the other day by being told that Mr. Anderson, one of the greatest
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organisers and improvers of departments, was opposed to it. He sent a message asking what was the fact; and Mr. Anderson's reply was, that until he saw the Government surrender its patronage he would not believe that it would do so, but that if competition and examinations were possible, of which he was not a judge, he thought they would confer the greatest advantage on the Civil Service. On the question of examinations he would not trouble the House at any length. Mr. Jewett, of Balliol College, Oxford, had given very decided evidence as to the possibility of conducting the examinations of a great number of men in a perfectly fair way; and the examiners of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, together with the inspectors of national schools, all agreed that there was little difficulty in conducting examinations with perfect fairness and success, although, of course, the manner in which it was to be done was a matter which required to be carefully considered. He could not help feeling, too, that he was now speaking sentiments entirely in accordance with those of a gentleman sitting near him, to whom he could not more particularly allude without being guilty of a breach of order, but a gentleman whom their Lordships must all admire for his admirable pronunciation of Norman French, for his courtesy in that House, and for his valuable public services (Mr. Shaw Lefevre, the clerk assistant). There was no doubt of his perfect competence to form an opinion on this subject, and, though the forms of the House forbade him to testify it by saying "hear" or "no," he (Earl Granville) had no doubt that it was in complete accordance with what he was then stating. Sir Thomas Freemantle, the Chairman of the Board of Customs, had also no doubt that examination, if it could be carried out, would add greatly to the efficiency of the public service. His opinion, however, was not entirely in accordance with that of himself (Earl Granville), for he thought—and the idea was not unnatural in a gentleman who had filled the office of patronage secretary—that, if the Government scheme were carried out, there would be a difficulty in managing the House of Commons. He (Earl Granville) was not indeed sanguine as to get the concurrence of "patronage secretaries;" he even doubted that of his noble Friend near him (Lord Stanley of Alderley), notwithstanding the purifying he had undergone at the Board of Trade. Now, for his part he believed that this ap-

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prehension was entirely groundless. What did history teach upon the point? Previous to the Revolution it was deemed impossible to manage the House of Commons without a liberal exercise of the Royal favour. In the time of Sir Robert Walpole not a Secretary of the Treasury could have been found who was not prepared to say that it was impossible for the Government to go on unless a certain number of bags of guineas were distributed among the representatives of the people. Since that period patronage had been employed as the agent of corruption; but some years had now elapsed since Lord Althorp declared in the House of Commons that the time for a system of Government by patronage was gone by; and every eminent statesman had since shown, by his words and deeds, that the true policy for a Government was to appeal to the good sense and intelligence of the large classes of the community, and not to the self-interest of individuals or of small classes. The culminating argument of the noble Lord was, that examinations took place in China, and that, therefore, we were not to take a similar course. He could not see much force in this, though it might, no doubt, be a weak argument in favour of the Government plan, to say this system has gone on for a long course of years in China—it is an institution greatly venerated by the Chinese—it had given a great stimulus to education there, and, as my noble Friend himself acknowledged, the feeling in favour of it is so strong that one of the arguments used by the rebels is that the Government has tampered with this system of examinations. When, too, he was told that there was corruption in China, was he to be told that it was due to this institution, and not to the tone of the morals of that country, where there was, unfortunately, a very different form of religion and state of morals to what prevailed in this country? Another course taken by the noble Lord was, to frighten them by threatening them with the introduction of what was called "a bureaucracy." Now a bureaucracy, in many continental countries, extended to a supervision of almost the whole of the daily life of every individual. To give an instance, He remembered himself wishing to bathe in a river on the Continent; but, before he was permitted to do so, he was obliged to perform certain aquatic exercises in the presence of a functionary in uniform, to obtain whose consent he had to go a considerable distance. That might be all very well in
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certain continental States; but he did think that to threaten with such a bureaucracy a country where there was a free press, the right of public meetings, and powerful Houses of Parliament, was about one of the wildest chimeras that ever arose in the human mind. He hoped the House would not think that he had gone into a full explanation, either of the course which the Government proposed to adopt, or of their reasons for adopting it. All that he had in view was to prevent its going forth to the world that the Government were not able to make any reply to the observations of the noble Lord, or to say anything in favour of admitting candidates by examination to public offices, leaving them afterwards to be promoted by seniority, subject to the exercise of the discretion of the chief of the office. This scheme had not been brought forward with any selfish feelings on the part of the Government, but entirely with a view to do justice to some of the best members of the Civil Service. It certainly carried with it this advantage, that while it removed not the stigma, but the slight suspicion which at present attached to the Government and to the Parliament, it gave a most powerful stimulus to education in all classes of the community.
LORD BROUGHAMsaid, that he was not about to follow the example of his noble Friend opposite (Lord Monteagle), by entering at any length into the subject, because he really was not yet aware of what the plan of the Government was, and also because he had some sort of impression in his own mind that they were not likely to hear much more of it. They had heard it defended in a fashion, with great ingenuity and candour, by the noble Earl who had just sat down; but with this exception he had not been fortunate enough to meet with a single individual in either House of Parliament, out of office, who did not hold up his hands at the bare mention of the plan, instead of treating it with respect, as a serious proposition. He should, therefore, in the present stage of the matter, refrain from entering into any discussion upon what might be gathered from the Report as likely to form the basis of the project when it should have assumed shape, and have been brought before either House. He would, however, again refer to an objection he had taken on a previous evening with respect to the question of responsibility. He would assume that the plan embraced no more than this—that there was to be a Board consisting of

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three Privy Councillors with assistants, or one of a more extensive description composed of learned and skilful persons, who should examine the candidates presenting themselves; that out of these a list of the persons eligible for the Civil Service should be selected, and that they were the only persons from whom the clerks of the different departments were to be chosen. His noble Friend (Earl Granville) said that there was nothing to prevent a man of great merit being appointed, even although he was not amongst the list recommended by the examiners. Still that would be an exception, the rule being the reverse. Then being once begun, he understood that the clerks were to rise by seniority. [Earl GRANVILLE: No, no.] He certainly understood so from the noble Earl's speech. This, however, showed the inconvenience of discussing a plan which had not yet been laid before them—he hoped it never would be. But what he had described was, he understood, to be, speaking generally, the form which this plan would take if it was ever endowed with shape. That this proposal would, in a great degree, vest the patronage of offices in the Board of Examiners was evident. He could not, however, suppose that the responsibility of the heads of the different departments, though it must be lessened thereby, would be wholly taken away. It was not probable that because a Board of Examiners had the power to enable persons to attain the first step on the ladder, therefore their subsequent promotion would not impose responsibility on the chiefs of departments. But look at what the consequences of such a power on the part of the Board would be. Almost every clerk and other functionary in a department would necessarily be holding office with a certificate of his having passed the examination of the Board; he would have the judgment of that Board, a great and authoritative body, in his favour; he would have their judgment testifying to his merits, his competency, and his character; in short, he would have a general judgment in his favour of a Board constituted of men who were scholars and learned in the various branches of literature and of science, and presided over by some great functionary. Now, he should like to know what comfort a chief of a department would have—a Secretary of State, for instance, or the next to him, the Under Secretary—when the clerks who were under them were persons each of whom had
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had a judgment pronounced by the very important body who constituted this tribunal in his favour? He apprehended that, if responsibility in the chief of an office was of great importance; and if capacity in a subordinate was of great importance, there was another thing of equal importance in all departments, and that was discipline. What discipline could there possibly be in any department when all who were subject to that discipline were furnished with a decision in their favour after a full examination by this very important body—this tribunal of professors, and schoolmasters, and scientific men? A person might be late in coming down to his office in the morning; he might go out of town on a Friday instead of on a Saturday; probably he might not come to town at the proper hour on Monday; there might be a thousand other little slips in the course of a week which are the objects of reproof and censure, and which the head of a department, and those immediately under him, as an Under Secretary, are constantly called upon to exercise their discretion upon; but if they found fault with a person who was in possession of the certificate, the answer might be, "Oh, I am not to be spoken to in this way; have not I a certificate of merit—have not I a decision—(probably a unanimous decision)—of this great tribunal pronounced upon my capacity—am I a person to be addressed in this way?" His noble Friend had spoken of the variety of persons he had consulted; and he (Lord Brougham) had also consulted persons who had been in office, and who had given him their opinions and their impressions as to what the consequences of such a plan must be when brought into practical operation; and the first thing they said was, "God forbid I should be in office with clerks under me every one of whom could produce a judgment on his merit in reply to any remonstrances that might be made against his official conduct." He only mentioned that as a sample of the kind of objections he had heard. His own opinion went along with the noble Earl (Earl Granville) in some respects, but in other respects he differed from him. It was his wish that the schoolmaster should be kept to his own proper functions; and, although he had at some former time and somewhere else expressed his high gratification that "the schoolmaster was abroad"—a phrase that had become somewhat popular—yet he was afraid he should now, if plans like this for

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making the schoolmaster depart from his proper province, and encroach upon provinces with which he had nothing to do, were to be adopted, feel inclined to wish that the schoolmaster might go home again.
THE EARL OF HARROWBYsaid, that he knew very little of the plan which was contemplated, except that it was intended to interpose some check upon the patronage of public offices, by creating some test in the shape of an examination with regard to the qualifications of the party to be appointed to that office. In what way that test was to be applied, by whom the examination was to be conducted, and how the offices were to be distributed after the examination, nothing was yet known further than what might be gathered from the Report on the table, which might or might not be an indication of the Government measure; and he wished to guard their Lordships and the public against running away with the idea that the plan, as suggested by the Commissioners, was that which the Government intended in all its parts to adopt. He could not help observing, however, that there appeared to be much less difficulty experienced by some noble Lords in imposing restrictions upon the Directors of the East India Company in the exercise of their patronage in regard to the government of India, affecting the wellbeing of 100,000,000 of people, than in adopting any similar restrictions in the administration of patronage at home. He could not but think that there was some little injustice, and some little inconsistency, in such conduct. Without, however, presuming to know more of the intentions of Government than what had been revealed by the noble Earl (Earl Granville), he would confine himself to saying that he believed the plan, so far as it had been indicated, was based upon a noble and generous principle, and that he did not think his noble and learned Friend, who had contributed so largely towards sending the schoolmaster abroad, should, after having seen the proofs of his labours, wish to call him back again to his home. As to the qualifications to be required on the part of the candidates for office, he did not conceive them to be that of great talent, or of high scientific attainments; but rather the moral qualities of steadiness of conduct and an application to business, as well as a power of acquiring practical knowledge. To ascertain the possession of these qualities, and, indeed, to en-
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courage young men to attain them, a previous examination appeared to him to be by no means inappropriate. Such a plan would tend to check the influence of corruption in the exercise of patronage, and would give an enormous stimulus to young men in acquiring knowledge. What was it the Government were now doing? They were training schoolmasters for the purpose of qualifying them to impart a more intellectual kind of instruction than had hitherto been given to the people; and what was the complaint? It was, that the people would not remain at school sufficiently long to avail themselves of the education which the Government had provided for them. It seemed to him that the plan now contemplated would have the effect of inducing the people to obtain all the advantages that the educational institutions of the country could afford them, and if that should be the result, he confessed he should hail the plan with the greatest delight. He did not feel competent to pronounce upon the Government scheme before it was laid before them; but as it necessarily involved a large and generous sacrifice of patronage for the sake of the public good, he hoped their Lordships would not hastily decide against it.
THE MARQUESS OF CLANRICARDEsaid, he hoped their Lordships would not be induced to vote either for or against the plan or the Report that was then before them in reference to any opinion they might have expressed last year on the proposition for instituting a previous examination of persons to be appointed to the government of the Natives of India. He entirely protested against the analogy instituted by the noble Earl. The noble Earl had not spoken with his usual accuracy when he said that those who readily voted to curtail the patronage of the East India Directors resisted a similar proposition when it was applied to patronage at home. So far from that being the fact, they did actually the reverse; for, instead of limiting the patronage of the Directors to a particular class, they extended it to the whole population of India. The Company's service was thrown open to 100,000,000 of Natives, and thereby the patronage of the Directors, although curtailed in one sense, was greatly extended in another. But there really was no analogy whatever between the two cases. He agreed with the noble and learned Lord (Lord Brougham) that there was no doubt somebody would obtain very considerable patronage under this plan,

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whatever it might be. The plan, however, was not yet before them; but the Report of the Commissioners was, and he begged to remind their Lordships that his noble Friend (Lord Monteagle) spoke upon the Report. That Report being before the House and before the country, and having had the honour of being connected with two very important offices under the Crown, the Foreign Office and the Post Office, he felt bound to hear his testimony to the injustice done by that Report to the civil servants of the country. A more able, a more efficient, or a more honourable body of men than those who were in the Foreign Office never were in any office in any country in the world; and he defied any system to produce a better set of men. He believed that the Foreign Office was still in as efficient a state as ever it was. The Post Office was an immense department, having an enormous amount of patronage; and, no doubt, it would be extremely desirable that a strict examination as to the qualifications of the candidates for that office should be established, so far as it was practicable. But so far from the candidates for Post-Office appointments being, as had been said, the maimed and crippled members of a family, if he were to believe the persons who recommended them, and the parents and relations who testified that they were competent for office, then he would say that there was no sort of qualification, physical or intellectual, which they did not possess. Perhaps there was as much exaggeration on the one side as on the other. Persons applying for appointments in the better classes of the Civil Service were expected to bring with them business habits, and the feelings and manners of gentlemen, and his conviction was, that the Civil Service of the country was filled by men of a class whom it was a wonder to find devoting their lives to so comparatively unprofitable a pursuit. The country had no right to expect men having the manners, habits, and education of gentlemen—men of business—to devote their whole lives to the service of the public, and then after, it might be, upwards of fifty years of labour (he recollected one gentleman who had served fifty-two years) rewarding them with a miserable life pension, barely sufficient for a gentleman to live upon, without affording him any means of making a provision for his family. In conclusion, he begged to protest against what was stated in the Commissioners' Report in respect to the Civil Service of the country.
THE DUKE OF ARGYLLsaid, the noble Marquess had protested against there being any analogy between the case of the East India Directors and the case now under discussion; and he rose to enter his protest against that protest of the noble Marquess. He thought the two cases were exactly analogous. It was true that in one sense it might be said that the patronage of the East India Directors had been extended, because they were allowed to choose from a far larger field than before; but there was interposed, before the patronage of the Directors could be exercised, the obstacle of a literary examination. He could not conceive that those who contended last year that a literary examination would tend to improve the Civil Service in India, could now deny that a similar measure would improve the Civil Service in England. It had been said during the debate that such a measure as that suggested would prove not only inconvenient, but highly detrimental. His noble and learned Friend (Lord Brougham) took it for granted that the plan of Government was the plan of the Commissioners, which it was not; and then he contended that, because this examination would produce a higher class of men in point of education, all discipline over them by their superiors would be lost; but the plan of the Commissioners, if adopted by the Government, would have an effect exactly the reverse of that. It would improve the discipline of the clerks, because their promotion, instead of being then dependent upon seniority, would be dependent upon regularity and upon their success in their avocations. He knew it was a plan, the Government viewed it as a plan, and they all knew that it was a plan that would be received with very great reluctance by powerful parties—by those who had been, or those who hoped to be, connected with public office and with the exercise of patronage—the natural bias of their minds was against the plan; but against the reluctance of official people he believed it would force its way on its own merits, and, either under the auspices of this Government or of some future Government, some such plan would be adopted.
LORD MONTEAGLEthought that they were called upon to act on an ex parte case, and that they should have the whole of the subject submitted to them before they were called upon to legislate on it. If the whole was to be legislated upon, they were bound to have an explanation

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with respect to the whole. His noble Friend had said that the promotions would still be under the control of the superiors; but the Report contemplated further examinations with respect to further steps of promotion in the offices. Again, he would say that if they were called upon to legislate upon the subject, they must, in justice to the public service, have some Report on the offices that were not included in this Report.
EARL GRANVILLEthought he had guarded himself from saying either one thing or the other—either that the plan that the Government intended to submit was identically the same as that of the Commissioners, or whether it differed from that plan, and in what respect. With respect to the question as to whether certain offices had been examined into or not, he must say that it would be a matter of convenience that notice of such a question should be given, in order that inquiry might be made in the department, and means thus afforded of obtaining the information that was sought for. Speaking perhaps not accurately, he was not sure himself whether all the evidence was not before the House; but he was certain that his right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be most anxious that every information in his power should be laid before their Lordships.
On Question, agreed to.
House adjourned till to-morrow.